Absolutely. As I said, difficult to answer since we don't really have comparable figures.

I'm not sure that's true. If bitcoin was this magical panacea for money launderers, as the government and banks like to portray it as, then why isn't the vast majority of global money laundering already using it? There is plenty of volume and plenty of off ramps to support billions or even trillions of dollars in money laundering. The bottom line is that cash remains, by far, the chosen method of money launderers.

Yes, with more crypto usage there will be more money laundering, but I'm not convinced it will "skyrocket".

Absolutely this. I like the way Andreas Antonopoulos put it when asked if it was a problem that bitcoin was used to by drugs. His answer was that drugs constitute the second biggest market in the world, and if you can't use your money in the second biggest market in the world, then what you have isn't money.

An additional paragraph appeared this morning at the top of a blog post Gavin Andresen wrote back in May 2016 about his meeting with CSW.


There has been a lot of discussion over the years about why Andresen never came out and formally denounced CSW, since it beyond any doubt that he is categorically not Satoshi. This is a step in the right direction, but it's a bit weak for my liking. Obviously it was a mistake to ever trust CSW, but Andresen needs to go further and categorically say "Sorry, I was wrong. CSW is obviously not Satoshi."

If anyone at Celsius actually cared at all about the transparency of customers selling their claims, then they could equally as easily set up a marketplace to allow customers to sell their claims on the open market in a transparent way, all without the need for a centralized scam token. The only motivation behind this token is Celsius' greed.

$4.2 billion in assets, and they pay out $11 million. 0.26%. Wow. And what about all the other 99.7% of their assets and the millions of customers who were ineligible for this pay out?

Honestly, that's a terrible choice of passphrase.

There is too much formatting which is very prone for error. Did you accidentally include a space before the line break? Did you use ' instead of " without realizing? Did different copies of the text use different formatting, different line breaks, no hyphens, etc.? Does your software parse line breaks in the same way as other software, or indeed at all? It is excessively long, too prone to errors, and too cumbersome to enter, especially on a hardware wallet.

If you can forget your passphrase, then you can just as easily forget which sentence you used or which word you started/end your passphrase with or which edition of the book you used and so on. Passphrases should be backed up on paper, just as seed phrases are.

Of course I do. But many people don't. Which is why we see people falling victim to clipboard malware on a weekly basis.

Unless you entered it wrong the first time without realizing it, sent coins to that wallet, and cannot discover the identical wrong combination to access your wallet again.

A better assumption is that no back up is ever 100% secure.

I was assuming you were only generating valid 24 word seed phrases to begin with.

I don't like it either. But if you are going to sign up to somewhere that involves you sending them large amount of money, then you should really be taking the time to read what you are signing up to. You can quite easily focus in on only the parts which are important to you, as I did when I quoted from their terms above. It took me all of 2 minutes to find those relevant snippets.

And if you don't read them at all, then you can't really get annoyed when the company in question behaves in the exact way they said they were going to, regardless of how scummy said behavior is. If you aren't going to read the terms, then you should work on the assumption that they give the company free reign to do anything they like with your money or your data. Because when it comes to centralized crypto entities, that is more often than not the case.

Difficult to answer because we don't have those figures.

What we do know is that 2.7% of fiat GDP is involved in money laundering, whereas 0.24% of crypto transaction volume is illicit. So even when adjusted for volumes, fiat is over 10x "dirtier" than bitcoin.

This is very true. Take a look at the top graph on the other Chainalysis report I just linked to above: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2023-crypto-crime-report-introduction/. Of their "illicit" transactions for 2020, the largest share (44%) is due to "sanctions". The US sanctions Russian businesses, and so now all their transactions show up as "illicit", according to this US based company.

Traditional Italian pizza!? Everyone knows pizza was invented in New York.

Instructions unclear. Putting ketchup and pineapple on my broken up spaghetti. Bellissimo!

This is a reasonable mitigation. Even better if you can use a new Tor circuit for each connection rather than a new VPN server.

I agree with DaveF above - searching for a "pro-privacy" Electrum server is the wrong path to go down. I am a very hardcore privacy advocate as many users will tell you, and I run an Electrum server that you could use. However, you are then simply trusting me completely to continue to be honest, as well as trusting my competence in that my set up will not accidentally leak your information, as well as trusting my security that no one is able to hack in to my server and monitor your usage, as well as being dependent on me not shutting down my server for any reason. It's a very precarious situation to be in, based entirely on trust of a completely unknown individual with nothing you can independently verify. You would be far better served setting up your own node and server.

It's probably worth putting that in context, though. Wachovia laundered $390 billion for drug cartels. Danske bank laundered $230 billion in Estonia. The entire $23.8 billion of the whole of crypto amounts to a fraction of the amount laundered in a single incident involving a single bank. It is absolutely minuscule in a global context.

Bit of both. You can see from the second chart, which ETF has shared above, that only around 10% of illicit funds are passed to a mixer. The majority of illicit funds go directly to a centralized exchange or to a DeFi exchange, the vast majority of which are also centralized and track everything their users do. So it is hardly surprising these criminals are easily caught. We also know there are plenty of not very good mixers (or even outright scams themselves) out there which can have their outputs and inputs correlated, and we also know that people often mess up and inadvertently recombine mixed coins with unmixed coins, rendering the whole mixing process useless.

You are describing a bank. Don't forget that they can also seize your coins and censor you at any time. Many exchanges do this already.

Or via any good DEX or P2P exchange. Or the best way - just spend it.

There isn't, because I don't use any platform or service which ever requests KYC.

All the things you have listed are to protect you from the exchange itself. I only need insurance if the exchange are sloppy with their security. I only need to report to the courts if the exchange tried to scam me. All this is completely unnecessary if you keep your own coins in your own wallet.

Being unable to achieve 100% anonymity does not mean you should therefore accept zero privacy.

Because I have nothing I want to share. If you aren't doing anything super secret, then I'm sure you'll have no problem sharing your real name, address, phone number, bank statements, all your bitcoin addresses, and the passwords to your email and social media accounts, just so we can all take a good look through your life and share anything interesting we find. After all, you aren't doing anything super secret, so you don't need privacy, right?

A test transaction only confirms that the seller has sent you the correct address (provided they confirm they received your test transaction). It does not confirm that your main transaction is correct. It is entirely possible to make a test transaction to the correct address, and then still copy the wrong address for your main transaction, or send the wrong amount of coins, or have clipboard malware change the address, or whatever.

A better solution would be a transaction which is timelocked far enough in the future, say a couple of days at least. Send that to the other party and have them confirm that their receiving address is correct. If it is, great - broadcast it in a few days. If it isn't, you can invalidate it and have your invalidation transaction several hundred blocks deep before the timelock expires.

Even better - include a small input of a few thousand sats in your original transaction, so you can invalidate it simply be moving this small input while leaving your input of tens of thousands of bitcoin alone.

Your benchmarks are a little off. In 2 seconds, I was able to generate >500 addresses starting with "bc1qkrash", which is 5 characters, and it took me 3 minutes to generate the following address starting with "krashfre" (since "i" is an invalid character), which is 8 characters. I've provided the private key as well so you can check I'm not just making it up. (But obviously no one should ever use this private key or address!)


OP, if you do want a similar vanity address, then there are ways of me or someone else generating one securely for you using a method known as split keys.

This should be very easy to brute force, even without knowing the address. I would also use btcrecover as ETF has suggested above.

What format is your private key in? Is it hexadecimal (only containing the characters 0-9 and A-F), or is it in WIF (containing a mix of numbers and letters, and starting with "5", "K", or "L")?

If it is hexademical, then 6 missing characters is only 16^6 = 16.8 million possibilities. Even an average home computer could exhaust this search space in a matter of minutes. If it is WIF, then the last 5 or 6 characters are checksum, so the number of actual possibilities will only be a handful and completely trivial to brute force.

Do you know if the address begins with "1","3", or "bc1"? It will be quicker to not have to derive and look up all three address types, but still easy enough to check all three if you don't know.

Yeah, this is a big issue, and as a merchant you must inform your customers that this is what is happening before you allow them to pay.

Let's say I go to a merchant and pay in bitcoin, and my bitcoin was actually sent directly to some third party exchanger to swap it for some altcoin that the merchant wanted instead. That third party exchanger takes some issue with my payment, so freezes my payment and demands KYC, which I'm not going to provide. I'm now out of pocket and the merchant will refuse to hand over the goods, since my payment hasn't reached him. But I would still blame the merchant for this, for if I knew what was happening and that my coins being frozen were a possibility at all, I'd never have used said merchant in the first place. There have been more than a few scam accusations I have seen against such exchange aggregator sites because of exchangers they have listed freezing funds for arbitrary reasons, and usually the exchange aggregator is less than helpful in resolving them.

The whole concept is a good idea, but the risks involved in the current implementation are too high.

Previous discussions about such issues should be unnecessary. All of this behavior is clearly laid out in their various terms and policy documents. If you (again, not you personally) don't bother to read them, and just sign up and throw your money at the site, then you really can't complain when the sites does exactly what they said they were going to do and hold your money hostage. It's the exact same pattern we saw with the likes of Celsius, Voyager, BlockFi, etc. Everyone who lost money is super angry that these sites were handing out their coins in risky loans with no collateral and no guarantees of funds being paid back, while the entire time their Terms of Use quite clearly said that this is exactly what they were doing.

Here are just two relevant quotes, but the entire documents I've quoted here are just page after page of saying how they will collect any data they like about you and then do whatever they want to with it:


So if you are going to sign up under these terms, then there is no point getting angry when they are enforced. It's your fault and your fault alone for not reading them before you deposited.

I'm going to break my spaghetti in half before I cook it next time. I hear that that's the authentic Italian way.

But then you lose your explanation.

"Why has this data, which you told me was nothing but random data from a secure wipe process, changed?"
"Oh, that's just because of my encrypted files inside my encrypted file system, which is disguised within this supposedly random data. Sorry, what I meant was, I have no idea!"

Personally, I would have my entirely encrypted drive appearing as nothing but random data, and a laptop with nothing sensitive on it. When I get to my destination, use Tor to download Tails and run it from a USB as a live OS, and then use that to mount and decrypt my drive. This avoids the risk of my regular OS storing any unencrypted information about my drive.

Unbelievable that people would ask him on Twitter, but not actually bother reading the Terms of Use. I pointed out several years ago that their Terms of Use quite clearly stated that you got absolutely nothing back in the event of something going wrong.

Hell, their Terms of Use are still live on their website:

So, in summary, all your assets are at risk of partial or total loss, you have no rights of ownership, and your coins are not recoverable.

But who to believe!? Mandatory legal documents or a tweet saying "fUnDs ArE sAfU".

And how long did it take your family to be alerted to the break in?

I've spoken about this before, but there are dozens of places you could hide a seed phrase on a piece of paper in a house that would be near impossible for an attacker to find unless they knew exactly what they were looking for and had days or weeks to take apart your entire house. Unscrew some electrical socket or light fitting and stuff the piece of paper inside your wall or ceiling (just be careful of the cables, obviously). Slice a tiny hole in to some piece of fabric furniture such as a sofa, put it inside, and sew it back up. Drill a hole in to to some piece of wooden furniture which would not ordinarily be visible and stuff it in - for example on the top of an internal door, or the join between a table leg and the top of the table.

A hardware wallet is obviously more bulky, but many of the same possibilities are still viable.

You couldn't obviously if you had no other back ups. I personally prefer to have all my back ups in at least two locations.